Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, 1854 - 1900

Wilde's father was a well-known surgeon, his mother was a six-foot poetess who lived to create sensation, a trait that Oscar picked up. For most of his years he treated life as a performance, buying much of his clothing from theatrical costumers rather than tailors. At thirty he decided to become respectable, married, and sired two sons. But two years later he started sneaking off to Oxford to disport with young men and abandoned his family, claiming to have "forgotten the address." He spent the years 1888 - 1895 in a haze of liquor and young men, but managed to do most of his writing during the period. This ended when the Marquess of Queensbury accused him of improper relations with the Marquess' son, Wilde sued for libel, but in the course of the trial his homosexuality was revealed and Wilde was sentenced to two years at hard labor. Out of prison again, he wrote little, took the alias Sebastian Melmoth, moved to the continent, and died penniless at Paris in 1900. He would have appreciated being remembered for his quotes.

A woman's life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. permalink

Oscar Wilde

"An Ideal Husband" (1895)

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast. permalink

Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization. Slavery was put down in America ... through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere who ... set the torch alight, who began the whole thing. permalink

Please report any problems on this page! If you see any typos, incorrect attributions, deformed characters, or any other problem with this page, we want to fix it as soon
as possible. Please click here to report errors.

Feel free to search through 103,098 quotes.

by text

by author

Note: Do not use titles in author searches, we don't use them, including president, senator, prime minister, king, queen, saint, or doctor, or abbreviations thereof. See explanation here.